back in the early 90s, there were many, many different options for running a bbs on IBM/DOS compatibles. many were descendants of source code that had been written, and re-written, and modded by various authors. arguably, the most beautiful of all of them (in terms of built-in ansi menuing) was iNiQUiTY by mike fricker. iniq was a rewrite of Telegard, which itself was a rewrite of WWIV's source code.

in the late 90s, the web was already going full tilt and i started to feel a pang of nostalgia for ansi and dial-up. i found out that mike released the software into the public domain, and iniquity had a new website, and new owners were rekindling development. it died after that, and the website and all knowledge of the site disappeared into obscurity

tonight, after trying to remember an url for 20 years (because I misremembered it), i finally found the original url for iniquity's website. i really miss this era - it was trying to reconcile ansi, ascii and web graphics in a single design:

https://web.archive.org/web/20030322235549/http://iniquitybbs.com/

mike went on to an incredibly successful career in game development, and is now the technical director at epic games

The Confiscation of Digital Memory
by Kaloyan Kolev IG @kaloyanez
at Arena @are.na
#KaloyanKolev #WebPreservation #Vbox7 #Bulgaria #video #Internet #AreDotna

https://www.are.na/editorial/the-confiscation-of-digital-memory

back in the early and mid-90s, getting on the net meant you were a university student, or had corporate access through a big company. getting online wasn't easy.

worse, even if you had a dialup number and login, there was no such thing as a tcp/ip stack built-in to Windows 3.1.

even if you *did* have a winsock stack, you'd still need a file downloading protocol, gopher client, world wide web client, ftp client, email client. just getting your machine off the ground was nearly impossible unless you could grab these from a local BBS

to make things simpler, universities began offering dial-up internet software packages to their students and staff.

in 1994, my mom was an undergrad student at the University of Alberta. our family had just bought an IBM PS/1 with a 2400 baud modem, and i was abusing the hell out of our single phone line at night visiting local BBSes.

she somehow found out that the university was selling internet dial-up software for $10 to students, and brought home the diskette pack with her. along with a USR Sportster 14.4k modem, she gave me the install diskettes as a valentine's day gift.

it had a slick setup program that enabled SLIP using Trumpet Winsock, and provided a local (free!) dial-up number for access.

after 25 years, i finally tracked down a few versions of those diskettes. i've imaged them and uploaded them all to IA.

the first version of the dial-up package in 1994 was called WinSLIP. it had no PPP support yet, but contained some really cool shareware internet utilities like HGopher and NCSA Mosaic. this would have been the earliest programs offered for Windows 3.1

WinSLIP/MSKermit 1994/95:
https://archive.org/details/ua_winslip

The second version of the software was renamed to NetSurf. It stripped out most of the obscure shareware sadly, and replaced them with Netscape 2 and Eudora Light. The new version of Trumpet Winsock offered PPP which was a huge improvement:

NetSurf 1996/97:
https://archive.org/details/ua_netsurf_96

Now well into the Windows 95 era, the 1997/98 software was shipped on a CD with a hilarious "multimedia" installer/help program designed in Macromedia Director:

NetSurf 1997/98:
https://archive.org/details/netsurf-97-starter-kit

I hope this brings back some memories for fellow U of A alumni :)

there is something wonderfully y2k about this Yahoo! branded rubiks cube i found in a thrift store years ago

like a pure expression of the unbridled hope for the millennium and shareholders’ dreams encased in plastic

in february 2000, Be announced it was releasing its BeOS operating system for free.

here is the website around the free launch. i sure do miss that swoopy web design aesthetic with handcrafted nav icons and lighting effects.

https://web.archive.org/web/20000815093906/http://www.be.com/products/freebeos/beosspecs.html

i've noticed in recent years that the laudable return to personal homepages has generally brought with it a very specific re-imagining of 1990s web design - usually lo-fi 1994 html-only and neon cyberpunkish affairs with loud animated gifs.

lost in that specific imaginary are 1996-1997 corporate designs that brought a slightly more conservative aesthetic that nonetheless remained playful.

if you played Inherit the Earth: Quest for the Orb, Dinotopia, or Faery Tale Adventure 2 you would remember The Dreamers Guild. this is their corporate site still live and maintained by joe pearce and brad schenck.

https://inherittheearth.net/dgi/indexnf.htm

thanks to @MossRC’s exceptional book Shareware Heroes, TIL that TUCOWS stood for The Ultimate Collection of Winsock Software.

one of the best parts of irc in the 1990s was that it exposed your ip/domain when joining a channel, so everyone could see where you hailed from. i loved looking up the ISPs of the folks who joined, often finding uniquely weird local ISPs

if you were in BC, Quebec or Ontario in the 1990s on 56k dialup, it's very likely that you'd join with a .sympatico.ca FQDN

this is Sympatico's home page in 1998, in english (february) and française (july)

only a year later, sans serif fonts would replace times new roman and courier, animated gifs would be removed, and corporate web sites like these would begin to take on a stale design stormcrowing the sterile web aesthetic of today

https://web.archive.org/web/19980704132623/http://www2.sympatico.ca/accueil

https://web.archive.org/web/19980213121627/http://www1.sympatico.ca/

buried in my 30 year old copy of NSCA Mosaic alpha was a bookmarked hyperlink to a university of cambridge (uk) live webcam of a coffee pot, brewing in the Trojan Room computing lab

while live coffee/lab cams were not uncommon in the mid 90s, this one is fascinating for a few reasons:

- it was up and running in 1991, predating the graphical world wide web by a few years
- it ran over the MSNL protocol using a telecom network standard called ATM, which was a competitor to ethernet
- an entire machine was dedicated to grabbing a frame from the camera, compressing it, and uploading to the web server: an Acorn Archimedes
- the exact URL stored in Mosaic still resolves today, and the web page hasn't changed in 30 years

https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/coffee.html

more history of the setup here:
https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/coffee/qsf/coffee.html

more images of the sacred pot by @quentinsf here:
https://statusq.org/archives/2024/07/11/12127/

thanks to a frame grab from doug block's Home Page documentary, i was able to dredge up this ultra-90s web site that is completely undocumented on the web

it appears that Apple once built/hosted a Mission Impossible promo site for the film for its 1996 release. it appears to be some kind of hypertext adventure game.

sadly, WBM didn't archive anything past the splash page. but at least the frame grab from the movie shows the login page

https://web.archive.org/web/19961111063127/http://mission.apple.com/

a perfect web page, circa 1997: Sunny's Ultima Webpage

still live on his university webspace after 27 years
http://www.fim.uni-linz.ac.at/staff/sonntag/ultima.htm

I adore Craftsmanship Magazine, but, as an archivist, I can't help but find this statement so guilelessly incongruous I could cry:

"a not-for-profit, all-digital multimedia publication that focuses on master artisans and innovators whose work informs our quest: to create a world built to last"

Incidentally, they have a website but are "slowly migrating more of our content" to Substack.

(both quotes from their email today)